TELLURIDE ’99 REVIEW: With a Dose of Fellini, Leconte’s Clever “Girl on the Bridge” Offers Giggles

TELLURIDE '99 REVIEW: With a Dose of Fellini, Leconte's Clever "Girl on the Bridge" Offers Giggles

TELLURIDE '99 REVIEW: With a Dose of Fellini, Leconte's Clever "Girl on the Bridge" Offers Giggles

by Margaret A. McGurk

Over the course of a 30-year career, Patrice Leconte has ventured across awide comic range, from giddy commercial fluff in the 1970’s to thesophisticated satire of the Oscar-nominated “Ridicule” in 1996. Before he made his mark behind the camera (which he still operates himself), Leconte was a cartoonist. That perhaps explains why his comedies are united by a sense of the absurd expressed with almost juvenile playfulness. And play he does in “The Girl on the Bridge,” a new comedy that made itsNorth American debut at the Telluride Film Festival, shortly after ParamountClassics bought U.S. distribution rights.

Leconte and screenwriter Serge Frydman find fodder for their game ineccentric characters, in the conventions of the romantic comedy, in thehistory of the road movie. When it comes to toying with the audience, thefilmmakers turn downright impish.

The story follows the peculiar relationship between a knife-thrower namedGabor (Daniel Auteuil) and Adele (Vanessa Paradis), the girl he meets whenshe’s about to jump off a Paris bridge. She has nothing, does nothing, andexperienced nothing except shabby treatment by men. Gabor offers her a jobas the target in his knife-throwing act; she jumps anyway. He goes afterher. They both survive, so she decides to hit the road with him.

At once, they discover they can make magic. The act is a hit. Gabor’s handis steady. Adele can’t lose at the roulette table. They can read oneanother’s minds. Their run of luck reaches giddy heights when Adele entersan Italian raffle and wins a sports car, which they immediately run off theroad.

Leconte knows what the audience expects to transpire between Gabor andAdele: She is young and lucious; he is middle-aged and hungry; they are bothneedy as newborns. And in their case, the romantic cliche “I’m no goodwithout you” is a matter of literal truth. But Leconte is interested in whatthe audience expects chiefly as leverage for sly tricks of emotionaljujitsu. Leconte will consummate their bond, but not in a predictable way.

The weakness in their partnership is Adele’s taste for handsome youngmen. In time, it pulls her away, sending Gabor on a grimly comic downwardspiral — he ends up on the street in Istanbul bouncing his knives off acrude painting of Adele — that leads him to a bridge of his own.

Leconte and cinematographer Jean-Marie Dreujou shot the film instrikingly effective black and white; they even dare to depict a rainbow. Inpart because of the way it looks, the movie invokes the European cinema ofMr. Leconte’s youth. Fellini’s “La Strada,” to name one, comes to mind earlyand often.

But where Fellini favored poignancy, Mr. Leconte goes for the giggles. Whathappens to Gabor and Adele is sad, to be sure, but not fatal. In that sense,“The Girl on the Bridge” reaches back even earlier for inspiration, to theworldly optimism of screwball comedy.

Leconte my be a touch too clever for his own good from time to time —those Fellini references do go on — but he has made something fresh andinviting out of classic parts, and all he wants is for you to come out andplay.

[Margaret A. McGurk is film critic at The Cincinnati Enquirer. She has alsowritten for The Independent Film and Video Monthly.]